Foreword to the Special Issue on the Yangtze River

摘要

The Yangtze River is one of the world's truly great rivers with a length of 6300 km (third longest in the world) and a drainage area of 1.80 ×10~6 km~2, housing nenrly 400 million people. The annual average flow and sediment transport of the Yangtze River at Da-tong (the downstream least-tide-affected measurement station) are 29,500 m~3/s and 327 ×10~6 t/year (post-Three Gorges Dam). It is interesting to note that the average annual flow of the Yangtze River exceeds the peak flow of the 1993 flood on the Upper Mississippi River at St. Louis, with approximately the same drainage area. Further, while the Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization, historians trace the origin of civilization in Yangtze River basin to roughly the same time as the Yellow River basin. Finally, the Yangtze River is home to some of the rarest aquatic species on earth, like the finless porpoise, Chinese alligator, Chinese sturgeon, and paddlefish.